If you’ve been on enough conference calls (and you have), you’ve experienced this at least once and I’m sure you’re gonna remember it. You’re on a conference call, bunch of people and as usually a handful are actively talking and the rest are listening.  One of the listeners gets another phone call or is interrupted and puts the call on hold.

Suddenly everyone on the conference bridge gets to enjoy whatever Music On Hold that person’s company PBX decides to play (usually something annoying or sickly sweet — why is that?). The conference grinds to a halt as the remaining participants try to figure out who the offender is and often no clue what to do. Usually after a few minutes, the offender slides back into the conference call, thinking they won’t have been missed and oops, they’re greeting with some steely comments from those who’ve had to endure the MOH.

But what could you have done?

With TurboBridge, the host can easily switch the conference to Question & Answer mode using the command ‘*43’. Q&A mode mutes everyone but the host and allows a participant to ‘unmute’ themselves by pressing ‘*6’. Thus  the offender is silenced, the remaining participants can enter ‘*6’ and the conference can continue If the host is using the TurboBridge Conference Manager, even easier, they can identify the offender and simply mute their line.

So don’t let some mishap ruin your conference call, using a few TurboBridge features, you’ll in command of your bridge and can continue on your way!

It’s a dirty secret in the telecommunication industry that many international voice calls are compressed to save on bandwidth costs. The result is your audio calls aren’t of the highest possible quality.  By compressing the call, your service provider is actually discarding some audio parts of your call.

This may be fine for a normal conference call. Compressed audio is clearly understandable. But what if some of parties on your conference call aren’t fluent in the spoken language on the call? That missing audio information suddenly becomes quite important as as misunderstandings start to occur, the classic “could you repeat that?”, “what does that mean?” questions start to appear. For those callers, they have to listen much more closely to the call to ensure they’re understanding what is going on. Sounds like a lot of work.

With TurboBridge, you have the option to directly connect your IP PBX or individual IP telephone set to the our audio conferencing service regardless of where you are in the world. On the Internet, we’re right next door! By directly connecting, only you and TurboBridge need to agree on how to deal with the audio from your conference and not the efforts of any telephone company to save money.

TurboBridge supports normal telephony quality equal to calling your next door neighbor, but in our case, it doesn’t matter if next door is half way around the world. TurboBridge also supports HD Audio if your IP PBX or IP telephone set has those capabilities.

With TurboBridge you can improve and ensure consistent quality of any audio conference regardless of the distance.

When I think about audio conferencing, I think about a group of people getting on the phone at once. But in the busy mobile world we live in, it’s often a struggle to track someone down on the phone. Thus I’ve started using audio conferencing simply as a meet-me point.

I’ll schedule a telephone call with someone and simply use my TurboBridge conference account to ‘meet up’ with that person at the appointed time. This saves a lot of hassle of me trying to find you by calling your office phone and getting voicemail because you’re already on the phone with someone else AND then me calling your mobile phone and disturbing you in the office. This merry-go-round continues when the other person tries to call you back and you’ve just stepped down the hallway. All in all a big waste of time for everyone.

By using TurboBridge conferencing, I simply dial in to my bridge at the appointed time and wait for you to join as well. This frees me up to continuing working until you arrive and gives you some latitude in the event you’re running a few minutes late.

TurboBridge is easy to use and our unlimited plan allows you to use conferencing for both the traditional group meeting as well as a simple 1:1 interactions.